As Under-Secretary of the Ted Hughes Rough Riders (Boston Chapter), I have been delighted by two recent developments. The first of these was the 2009 release of the Eagle Twin album The Unkindness of Crows (Southern Lord), which grafts the vibe (and some of the verses) of Hughes’s nihilist bardic freakout Crow onto slabs of top-notch doom rock. The second was this statement from Martin Amis, in the “Acknowledgements” section of his new novel: “First I offer my enraptured thanks to the memory of Ted Hughes. His Tales from Ovid is one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. My debt to it goes well beyond the exquisite ‘Echo and Narcissus,’ which I quote from and paraphrase throughout.”

“Enraptured thanks”: very good. Here’s the thing, though. Although I understand exactly what Eagle Twin are doing with Hughes, Amis has me perplexed. Growling “In the beginning was scrrrrrrr-eeeeeaaam . . . ” over a Mariana Trench of a bass line while the drummer passes out from the pressure — that’s a solid æsthetic venture. The application of “Echo and Narcissus” to Amis’s interior (very interior) history of the Sexual Revolution, however, remains obscure. He keeps jamming it in there, the imagery of duplication and mirroring — “Here in the castle, when you walked down the length of its stone passages, the echo was louder than the footfall. . . . Hello. Echo. And you kept seeing your reflection, too, in unexpected places . . . ” — but I’m buggered if I can quite see why. My fault, I’m sure, but somewhere in the 384 pages of The Pregnant Widow he lost me.

The novel begins hazily, “in a castle on a mountainside above a village in Campania, in Italy.” Clear skies, summer breezes with a waft of inner thigh. The year is 1970. Young Keith Nearing, his girlfriend Lily, and the beautiful Scheherazade (yes, that’s her name) are flopping about, swimming and smoking and sunbathing, accomplices in pleasure. But there are clouds upon the horizon. Clouds in the shape of breasts. In the shape of Scheherazade’s breasts, to be precise, which are troublingly magnificent. The agonies begin. “So you understand about Scheherazade’s breasts,” says Keith to a visitor called Whittaker. “I like to think so,” answers Whittaker (who is gay). “I paint, after all. And it’s not the size, is it. It’s almost despite the size. On that wandlike frame.” “Yeah,” agrees Keith. “Precisely so.”

Will Keith shag Scheherazade? This becomes the matter of the novel, for many pages. Other stuff is going on too, of course. There are grim flashes-forward to Keith in late middle age, in London, cowering before the bathroom mirror (an anti-Narcissus, I suppose). And higher-journalism thoughts upon the Great Changes wrought by the ’60s: “point three in the revolutionary manifesto . . . was this: Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are.” (Another gleam of Narcissine reflection as the superficial, the surface, rises toward us.) But in terms of your actual experience, dear reader, this is all so much foreplay. What you want to know is: Will Keith shag Scheherazade?

2009: The year in books Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best books the Phoenix reviewed in 2009.

Reading is fundamentalist In 2009, liberals held firm control of the presidency, the US Senate, and the US House of Representatives. But there was one realm where conservatives dominated: the New York Times bestseller list.

Interview: Raj Patel "The opposite of consumption is not thrift but generosity; if you look at happiness studies, we are happiest when we give things away rather than when we accumulate or when we don't spend."

Creating a legend The soldiers of the 20th Maine Regiment marched quickly into the night, moving west from Hanover toward Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1863.

Scientology defector tells all If every last allegation that Church of Scientology (CoS) defector Nancy Many charges in My Billion Year Contract is true, then her book should inspire several FBI raids and a Lifetime mini-series to rival any Charles Manson documentary.

Heart keeps beating Storytelling is largely about character, and writer Thomas Cobb came up with a doozy when he conceived Bad Blake.

Power of place I'd arranged the trip (Dogtown is about an hour and a half south of Portland) because I was planning to write about Elyssa East's new book, Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.

GETTING TO KNOW PHILIP LARKIN WITH A NEW EDITION OF HIS POEMS | April 26, 2012 "A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.

BLACK SABBATH ARE BACK — IN PRINT AND ON FILM | November 14, 2011 The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.